Hello all,

After a frustrating few hours trying to access Fb 1.5.3 Classic on a
brand-new installation of Mandriva 10.2 LE and having found what the
problem was, I thought it might help someone else.

I fresh-installed this OS on one of my test-servers after replacing a
Mandrake 10.0 installation there with Ubuntu. I immediately decided
to get rid of Ubuntu and took up my nice, crisp CD distro of Mandriva
10.2 LE. I took the default install - everything but the kitchen
sink - for once I didn't take the time to specifiy packages individually.

All went well until "the first thing to go wrong". This build of
Classic needs an older C++ runtime to work with the libfbembed.so
client (libstdc++.so.5 instead of libstdc++.so.6). Symlinking the
.so.6 library as .so.5 didn't solve it, it just got further along the
road and threw several dependency exceptions.

I looked for a compat libstdc++ package (being used to these
compatibility problems from my experiences with Kylix over the
years!) but there was no mdk in86 package that had
libstdc++.so.6. In the end I just picked up and installed the
compat-libstdc++ package from Fedora Core 3 (found via rpmfind.net)
and it worked a treat. I was finally able to go in and change the
sysdba password locally.

Next was to test connectivity from around the network. I knew the
network was working fine - all pings OK both ways between 6 machines
and a router and the newly installed OS was reaching the Internet
just fine through the ADSL router.

But - boom - no clients could connect to the new
server. "..connection did not succeed because foreign host actively
refused it.." I managed to waste several hours fiddling about with
the firewall and hosts.allow, to no avail. Finally, I decided it
would be a good plan to do a chkconfig on xinetd and reboot...Whoa,
guess what...xinetd wasn't installed! So I installed it (from Disk
1, for those who don't have the package list) and all was sweet.

It's the first Linux installation I've ever come across, where xinetd
(or, in olden days, inetd) was not installed by
default. Extraordinary. Alex, if you're watching this, given that
Mandrake/Mandriva is one of our supported OSes, maybe it's time to
include a rpm -qa test for xinetd during the rpm install of Classic?

./heLen